Harris-backed filibuster change would ‘break’ the Senate, McConnell says

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lambasted a proposal from Vice President Kamala Harris that would eliminate the filibuster to pass abortion rights legislation — warning Democrats that they will rue the move when Republicans next control Washington.

“What they want to do is break the institution in order to achieve what they want to achieve,” he said in an interview Thursday.

McConnell spoke two days after Harris told Wisconsin Public Radio that “we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe” — in other words, changing the Senate’s rules to exempt a vote to restore the abortion rights guarantee under Roe v. Wade from the chamber’s usual 60-vote threshold for legislation.

Such a scenario would be likely only if Harris wins the presidency and Democrats keep the Senate and retake the House majority — currently a tall order for a party facing a tough Senate map. Notably, two former Democrats who blocked prior attempts to undermine the 60-vote rule — Sens. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) — are retiring.

But McConnell, delivering some of his most pointed and substantial criticism of a Harris proposal since she became a presidential candidate, said that the proposal would spell the end of the filibuster altogether, explaining that her suggested exemption for Roe would put the chamber down a steep and slippery slope.

“There's no way you can have a minor carve-out” for one issue, he said. “Because then you’ll come up with the next idea that’s more important than the rule — then, practically, it’s over.”

Democrats last tried to break the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation in the early years of President Joe Biden’s administration, when they had control of both the House and Senate. Manchin and Sinema’s opposition tanked that effort, but the 2022 Supreme Court ruling overturning Dobbs focused new attention on the rule — with Harris, then a senator, joining many other Democrats in backing filibuster changes in the immediate aftermath of the decision.

Such a move, Harris said Tuesday, would “get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

McConnell said that would permanently change the nature of the Senate, for the worse.

While at least some presidential nominations have been exempt from the filibuster for more than a decade, doing the same for legislation is a "totally different matter, he said: “The Senate was designed to do one of two things: Kill bad stuff or force a reasonable compromise — and that's what it's done all along.”

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

McConnell warned that if they adjusted the filibuster rules Democrats would then use simple-majority votes to entrench their power by admitting D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, likely adding four additional Democratic senators. “Then,” he said, they’ll “go after the Supreme Court.”

“So it would fundamentally, in my view, turn America to California,” he continued. “And I think that is a major structural change to the country.”

McConnell has long been a fierce defender of the Senate’s legislative filibuster, withstanding public pressure to change the rules during Donald Trump’s presidency and then openly encouraging Manchin and Sinema as they stood athwart their fellow Democrats’ recent push.

If Democrats do go nuclear, McConnell said Thursday, Republicans will also take advantage of the new system: “They never think about what might happen when the shoe is on the other foot.”

Asked what bills Republicans would pass without the filibuster, McConnell said, “I don't know, but I'm sure they wouldn't like it.”

Over the past decade, a similar dynamic played out over the use of the filibuster for Senate confirmations. In 2013, McConnell cautioned then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) not to break the filibuster for lower-level court nominations, which Republicans had been blocking.

“You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think,” McConnell said at the time.

When Republicans took the chamber a few years later, McConnell cited Reid’s rule change to justify going nuclear for Supreme Court nominations — helping Trump confirm three conservative justices in what’s become the most sweeping overhaul to the court in a generation.

Asked if he has any regrets about that move, McConnell said he did not.

“I said to my members, if a candidate like [Neil] Gorsuch — who is so obviously totally qualified — can't get 60 votes, there's nobody we can pick that we're comfortable with that can get confirmed,” he said. “And so we lowered the threshold for the Supreme Court.”

Like this content? Sign up for POLITICO's Playbook newsletter.